GraphiX: A Fast Human-Computer Interaction Symmetric Multiprocessing Parallel Scientific Visualization Tool1

Abstract

Scientific visualization tools are essential for the understanding of physical simulation, as it gives a visualization aspect of the simulated phenomena. In the past years, data produced by simulations join the big-data trend. To maintain a reasonable reaction time of the user’s commands, many scientific tools tend to introduce parallelism schemes to their software. As the number of cores in any given architecture increases, the need for software to utilize the architecture is inevitable. Thus, GraphiX – a scientific visualization tool parallelized in a shared-memory fashion via OpenMP version 4.5 was created. We chose Gnuplot as the graphical utility for GraphiX due to its speed as it is written in C. GraphiX parallelism scheme’s work-balance is nearly perfect and scales well both in terms of memory and amount of cores. We achieved a maximum of 560% speedup with 16 cores while visualizing approx 3 million cells.